AdAge quotes people familiar with the plans as stating that the new iAds will be introduced later this year and the plan is that they will play automatically on the screens of iPhone and iPads.

The new video ads are described as “interstitials” meaning that they will play during moments of transition such as the end of a level within a game or when a user finishes reading an article.

Apple is predictably tight lipped on the plans and it is so far unclear as to how the ads will be sold and what price Apple will choose to offer them to advertisers at. Another person that is familiar with the plans stated that the firm may choose to sell them through the new Apple ad exchange that was unveiled just “a couple of weeks ago.”

iAds, which was first launched by Apple back in 2010, has been shunned by many advertisers due to the high prices it was originally charging for the service. At launch it levied a price of $1 million [£597,300] on anyone wanting to advertise on the service, which was reduced to first $500,000 [£298,650] and eventually to $100,000 [£59,730].

Figures on the amount of money Apple makes in ad revenues are particularly scarce and it reportedly doesn’t even have any sales targets for those working in its advertising department.

The last set of figures made public showed that it posted $125 million [£74 million] in mobile ad sales for 2013, according to IDC, which was far behind Google’s figures of around $243 million [£145 million] for the same year.

Numbers on the mobile ad industry as a whole show that spending will hit $18 billion [£10.75 billion] in 2014 before it increases to $41.9 billion [£25 billion] in 2017 and illustrates why Apple sees it as a integral part of its strategy.